How to combat envy?
In Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, Rand makes her famous statement about envy being hatred of the good for being the good and says that we live in the Age of Envy. Of course, she is right.
If any society is to be worth living in, it must recognize good as being good.
1) Why are some people envious?
2) Why do societies tolerate envy?
3) What can one or more of us do, if any of us considers it to be in his/her best interest, to foster a society that thoroughly rejects envy?
I understand that the vast majority of those in this forum are not religious, and I am not trying to convert anyone with the following argument. However, when most Americans were churchgoing, envy was stigmatized as a deadly sin. That stigmatization long kept envy as a minor issue in America. Now that America is largely secular, we live in The Age of Envy. Rather than pursue Objectivism, most Americans that have gone secular have lost an appreciation for how destructive envy is. Perhaps this is what Dennis Prager meant in the blog that khalling started recently.
I am willing to live in a secular society, but not in one that condones envy.
4) Without forcing Objectivism down people's throats in the way that Christianity was forced upon people, how does one achieve a secular society that still stigmatizes envy?
If any society is to be worth living in, it must recognize good as being good.
1) Why are some people envious?
2) Why do societies tolerate envy?
3) What can one or more of us do, if any of us considers it to be in his/her best interest, to foster a society that thoroughly rejects envy?
I understand that the vast majority of those in this forum are not religious, and I am not trying to convert anyone with the following argument. However, when most Americans were churchgoing, envy was stigmatized as a deadly sin. That stigmatization long kept envy as a minor issue in America. Now that America is largely secular, we live in The Age of Envy. Rather than pursue Objectivism, most Americans that have gone secular have lost an appreciation for how destructive envy is. Perhaps this is what Dennis Prager meant in the blog that khalling started recently.
I am willing to live in a secular society, but not in one that condones envy.
4) Without forcing Objectivism down people's throats in the way that Christianity was forced upon people, how does one achieve a secular society that still stigmatizes envy?
The basic virtues of the Objectivist ethics are the antidote for envy and resentment. It's not a matter of forcing ethics on people; ethical ideas spread like any ideas. Religious duties were spread by preaching them, not just the brute force enforcing them against what was accepted as guilt and irrational fear of fire and brimstone threats. Better ethical ideas based on reason, value and causality provide the reason to reject envy.
If that is not what you meant, then I think we will respectfully disagree on this point. I will continue to think that envy has very little, if anything, to do with altruism. Envy is much simpler than that. Rand's definition is admirable:
Envy is hatred of the good for being the good.
The envious do resent achievement, but altruism never crosses most people's minds when they envy, and neither does sacrifice.
An honest and aware media would help also.
I think that the high points of Christianity ( no mysticism) can be reformed in a conscious, quantum physical way, and in Ayn's biological objective way. Because both abhor envy and endorse rational self interest...I know, you might disagree about the last part but it was the church, the organization of it that adopted Socrates - altruism, self sacrifice, not the teachings and the history. Aside from the history, much of it can be discarded...